1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a battery management system and a charger for managing the charging and service life of batteries to which an identification ID is attached.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, some chargers were designed to allow the reading device to read out the identifier for identifying a battery, so that the number of chargings was updated and stored for each battery (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 05-172914). On the other hand, as for battery management methods, some of them were designed in a manner such that chargers were given a function of reading identification information provided to batteries in use and one of the chargers connected to a computer was given a function of sending identification information and charging voltage information to the computer in order to manage the information of individual batteries by the computer (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 10-66266). In another battery management method, each charging device was configured to send the identifier of a battery to the computer upon charging the battery (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2002-313433).